The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee a majority of the Electoral College to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The bill would reform the Electoral College so that the electoral vote in the Electoral College reflects the choice of the nation's voters for President of the United States. more

11 Enactments

The National Popular Vote bill has been enacted into law in states possessing 165 electoral votes — 61% of the 270 electoral votes needed to activate the legislation.

It's been more than a decade, but Democrats still haven't forgotten the heartbreak of Al Gore's 2000 loss of the presidential election to George W. Bush. In that race, half a million more Americans cast ballots for the Democrat but the Electoral College nonetheless swung the race narrowly to the Republican.

The form their redress is taking in California, however, is on its face a fair if strange proposal. The Legislature is pushing a plan that is not only nonpartisan but in effect would favor the Golden State's Republicans by making their now all but symbolic votes for president truly count.

You wouldn't know it from the partisan split in the state Assembly on Thursday, when a largely party-line vote — Democrats in favor, Republicans including the 2nd District's Jim Nielsen opposed — passed AB 459, which would pledge California to the National Popular Vote compact.

This deal among a small but growing number of states amounts to a clever constitutional end run around the Electoral College. Each member state will assign its electoral votes not to the candidate who wins that state, but instead to the winner of the nationwide popular vote. It will take effect only if states representing more than half the electoral votes (which are based on state congressional delegations, thus favoring small states) sign up. Seven states and the District of Columbia have enacted National Popular Vote laws thus far.

The bill is more than Al Gore's revenge. Boosters point out that poll-driven presidential campaigns all but ignore states they either can't win or have sewn up. Whoever runs against Barack Obama next year, the Republican candidate and the incumbent will both be scarce in California, a lopsidedly safe Democratic state, as well as Republican Texas. The only votes that seem to matter are in the swing states.

Yet a president governs the entire country — and candidates ought to campaign that way, not snub vast swaths of it while doggedly working to shake every hand in Ohio and Florida.

Conservative opponents of a change argue for the virtues of the Electoral College as a piece of our nation's federal system, a bastion of states' sovereignty, an assurance that rural states will win political attention. (Never mind that small states Vermont and Hawaii have already embraced the plan.) Some also express the tactical fear that a mighty Democratic political machine will run up votes in liberal big cities and leave conservatives forever in the dust.

Well, the Republicans know how to motivate voters too. And in places like California, where their ballots would count as part of the national tally instead of drowning in the deep blue sea of Democrats, conservatives would have all the more reason to get out and vote on Election Day.

In any particular state, joining the National Popular Vote movement is actually a gift to the political minority. You'd think California's long-suffering conservatives would grab the opportunity.

Reform the Electoral College so that the electoral vote reflects the nationwide popular vote for President